Very nice and extensive coverage of BU @ Duke, 11-year old dunking, and debunking other myths!!

Another couple of articles this morning in the local Peoria newspaper about the BU-Duke game...this brings the total number of separate articles and columns since early this week to at least 10-12...so I want to express thanks to Dave Reynolds & Kirk Wessler for thorough coverage, and Adam Gerik gave us some nice pics.
This is the kind of excellent coverage I know most BU fans really enjoy and appeciate....keep it up!



Did you see the latest superstar of the future??
It's a video of a supposed 11 year old throwing down a dunk...
http://rivals.yahoo.com/highschool/blog/prep_rally/post/Seventh-grader-throws-down-thunder-dunk-on-a-fas?urn=highschool-293433
http://www.bballspotlight.com/

Of course the kid is already being recruited...
http://thehoopdoctors.com/online2/2010/12/arkansas-8th-grader-receives-scholarship-letter-from-baylor/



Another article with misinformation -- a story about head coach Tom Crean saying when he was hired, he inherited a team with only two returning walk-on players.
http://www.illinihq.com/news/mens_basketball/2010/12/09/crean_gets_indiana_back_on_track

Well - believe what you want, but one of the two players, Kyle Tabor was a scholarship player, and....when Crean was hired, he inherited at least SEVEN other highly rated scholarship players who had eligibility to return.....
It is a big lie that we see all the time about how poor little TC had a bare cupboard, but it was he who cleaned it out himself, in reality!!

---- Tom Crean was hired on April 2, 2008........
..and at the beginning of April, Indiana had SEVEN other players that for some reason get portrayed as having already been long gone...but they were NOT!
There were -- Armon Bassett, Jordan Crawford, Jamarcus Ellis, Eric Gordon, Eli Holman, Brandon McGee, and DeAndre Thomas all still in school, ON THE ROSTER, on scholarship, and with eligibility to return the following fall.
Bassett and Ellis were dismissed right away and it was one of the stipulations that Crean insisted on, as they were reportedly heavily involved in drugs and bad things!!
Eli Holman & Brandon McGee didn't leave until mid-to-late-May, Gordon in June, DeAndre Thomas not until late July, and perhaps the BEST of those who would have definitely been returning, Jordan Crawford, didn't decide to leave IU until July 11, 2008, THREE months after Crean was there, and so whose fault is it??
Most of those guys were said to have been dismissed personally by Tom Crean, even though clearly some would have stayed if welcomed.
http://www.kentucky.com/2008/06/12/431409/jordan-crawford-leaves-iu.html

So --it was Tom Crean's own desire to boot those players, free up the scholarships, and thus start with one season that had nobody! He can't blame anyone else and please stop making the guy into a helpless victim in all this, as he ran off several 4-Star players who would have racked up a lot more wins than the guys he kept behind at IU.
He also inherited two desirable recruits who were already signed at Indiana and who kept their commitments...so had he wanted, Crean could have started his first season with at least 9-10 top notch returning players, but he CHOSE NOT TO!!!
...case closed.....



Now there's talk that Duke's Kyrie Irving might be out for the entire season!

Illinois' Brian Cook got into an altercation and was ejected and will serve a 2-game suspension.



Saw a piece on something called "integrative medicine" in the paper this morning...
Even though I am well read on this subject, I have to admit I really don't quite know what this area of medical specialities really is. What is it that's being integrated?? (whatever sells or whatever people can be duped for!)
It's as if they think they have discovered an entire area of a person's health that THEY integrate into their thought processes, that somehow everyone else is totally missing or unaware of!
But this is just a catchy-sounding and "client"-enticing (sucker-enticing) name that gets used, when in fact it is a bogus, counterfeit "specialty" that is about as legit as snake oil...
On further inspection, what you really find is that most people who are into "integrative medicine" are also into other really, really quacky area of mdeical care...so buyer beware!

Case in point...

--Some "integrative" people peddle something called "touch therapy". Well, you can believe what you want, but touching people can never and will never diagnose nor treat one single real illness. If touching someone makes them better, then they didn't really have anything wrong with themselves in the first place, and they're wasting their money or getting taken to the cleaners.
http://www.harthosp.org/integrativemed/Therapies/TherapeuticTouch/NursingTouchTherapy/default.aspx
http://www.wfubmc.edu/Center-for-Integrative-Medicine/Specialty-Services/Healing-Touch-Study.htm

--other "integrative" practitioners integrate something called chelation therapy into their arsenal of things to rip people off with.
Here's one example - just click on this line...
I won't waste your time telling you how useless and phony "chelation therapy" is, but if you catch me off line I can give you names and details of plenty of people who believed and sought chelation who died as a direct result of it...
and these scheisters peddle plenty of other quackery, too -- just do some digging..
http://www.quackwatch.com/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/chelation.html

--all I would ask if you want to know more that might save your life or your health or your money is just do a simple google search on ...
"integrative" and "quackery"
...or "integrative" and "arrested"
.. or "integrated" and "unlicensed"...
...then if you are still gullible enough to think a couple of family doctors in Peoria have suddenly stumbled onto, discovered, figured out, and perfected an enormously important and useful area of medicine that the rest of the world simply doesn't know about...then I have a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn.



I also saw a couple hours of a History channel program last night about how aliens from outer spce have obviously visited many ancient and recent societies and helped them along with their technology...
The main points that they believe the evidence is overwhelming for...
--aliens vistied the ancient Egyptians and gave them all their technology so they could build the pyramids
--aliens visited the Nazi Germans and gave them all their incredibly advanced technology.
--and that the pictures on the walls of ancient pyramids & other structures are proof of such.

My simple rebuttals, other than the fact that all the loonies who espouse this crap are guys like Eric Von Daniken who have made gazillions selling their fiction-filled and speculative books to gullible people on this subject...are...

--The Egyptians did not have much technology, they had stone age stuff -- like hammers, chisels, rocks, wooden carts, etc. If some really advanced aliens were going to help them with new technology then why didn't they have a single thing that other societites didn't have, like truly advanced metallugy, plastics, electronics, medicines, etc... Of course we can see from digging up mummies, they had almost NO real technology at all, all their highest rulers died young with horrible diseases and infections, and the only way they build remarkable structures was because of enormous manpower.

--The only "advanced" technology the Germans had like rockets, jets, etc...was only a mere couple years ahead of everyone else..and the US would have developed all of it shortly...
but the real clincher is that if the aliens had any reason at all to help the Nazis, then why didn't the help them get the bomb and win the war? Seems the Germans didn't have enough technology to prevent old Adolf's empire from getting crushed.
--If you want to know exactly how much we ought to be able to know about people from the stuff they draw, or sculpt, especially the stuff left to honor and glorify their leaders....then consider this...
If someone eons from now ever does a dig in Illinois, and find a Barbie Doll, a Peanuts comic strip, a writeup about the President by Chris Mathews, and a taped copy of a Boy George performance, then they will conclude all American women were thin and gorgeous, all men were round, silly, and pudgy, all the people in the US were magically enthralled by a charismatic leader with superpowers over his subjects, and all that most of the people ever did was sit & be entertained by aliens. Case closed.